The Patron Saint of Liars and Fakes
by Lucia de'Medici
Summary: The strange and complicated means by which Rogue met Remy LeBeau, a dark fairytale.
1. Strange Places, Dark Passages

**Title: **The Patron Saint of Liars and Fakes  
**Fandom: **X-Men Movieverse, post X3  
**Summary:** The strange and complicated means by which Rogue met Remy LeBeau, a dark fairytale.  
**Pairing:** Rogue/Gambit  
**Rating:** Teen/Mature  
**Warnings:** The standard fare.

**

* * *

**

**The Patron Saint of Liars and Fakes  
****...  
Chapter I: Strange Places, Dark Passages**

"For us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark,  
all our cries burlesqued in joyless laugther;  
and with the garbage of liveliness stuffed down us untill our guts burst bleeding green,  
we go screaming round the world, dying, in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels,  
eternal homes of the transient heart._"_

- Truman Capote_  
_

**

* * *

**

This story begins, like many others, with the unquestionable doubt that things could be worse.

Worse than the dingy bar, with its dirty amber lighting and the gouges in the bar top, worse than the stink of unwashed truck drivers, sweaty from too many ephedrine-all-night-cocktails, and washed down with cheap beer from filthy glasses.

Rogue hunched lower, her elbows skidding out to the sides and nudging her empty pint in the direction of the barkeep. With her hood pulled low over her eyes, her anonymity was a guaranteed assurance – save for the single strip of white spilling over her cheek. Clumsily, she tucked it behind an ear, and with the same sloppy grace of the inebriated, tugged the green wool lower over her eyes.

She wet her lower lip and tasted stale alcohol, and highway grit imbedded deep into her skin from hitching three hundred miles and taking the backlash and the rain spat up from the cars driving too close to the shoulder.

Yet she was no more aware of the tightness in her jaw than the steady weight of the odd glances thrown at her from the bar's occupants. The alcohol had seen to that.

Yeah, it could be worse, she decided dimly.

Worse would be the fact that Bobby Drake had been dead for nearly five hours beneath her arm before Rogue had awoken to the sorry, stiff sensation of the cold body.

Dr. McCoy, now a permanent fixture at Xavier's Institute for Gifted Children, had noted with clinical astuteness that rigor had set in unnaturally fast; a medical anomaly that indicated Bobby's mutation would probably preserve his body longer without the need for refrigeration in the morgue.

She thought it darkly ironic that, should she return to the Institute at any given moment, which was not soon, she mentally declared, she could share her final grievances with him face to face. The parlour would be more than sufficient to lay him out, open-casket, just like they did back home in the South.

The thought trailed errantly, leaving a dull echo in its wake. Home; that indefinable place that cast her out three years ago; that shifted and mutated to accommodate her own ghastly deformity, that welcomed her, that she grew to love, where she found love, where she returned to even after she'd suppressed her very nature with genetically-altered suppressive x-gene derivatives.

Rogue sucked in a breath, her stomach roiling with the sudden swirl of her noisy surroundings.

…And the home that had alienated her for her choice though she continued to live under its roof and in the arms of someone who'd cared for her despite her own selfish incentives.

Since then, "home" had become something else entirely.

She could have stayed. She could have apologized for thinking everything would have been alright – leaned over Bobby's casket, seen her own breath turn to steam as it touched his face, and given him one final kiss that could hurt him no more than it hurt her to steal. A fairytale ending; future imperfect with a prince who can't wake up.

That was twelve hours ago.

"Honey, I think you've had enough."

Bobby Drake was dead, and she had killed him.

"Home" ceased to exist with the insistent snap and recoil of her genomes as they reverted to their monstrous state.

Sniffing heartily, Rogue barked a throaty laugh, and fumbled for her glass – now conspicuously out of reach from her struggling, shriven fingers.

"So long as Ah'm still sittin' upright, mister –" Gesturing slovenly, she lurched, chin nearly hitting the pitted wood as her arm gave out from under her, and pushed the tumbler towards him. Its base rattled across the counter top where her gloved hands failed to trap the slick surface. "Ah ain't even done."

* * *

Rain. The pissing-wet, unending, dreary downpour coaxed a grimace from the young man in his early twenties as he stalked up to the phone booth. Water slid into his collar, drenching the back of his cowl and the skin beneath like tiny wet fingers that strove to stiffen his muscles and make his old aches burn with wanting for the humidity and the heat of the South.

_Dieu_, days like these he missed New Orleans something fierce.

Remy LeBeau stepped into the phone booth, shutting the door behind him with a fluid snap of rattling glass and groaning metal, took one look at the ordinary dial-a-box with its faded numeric keypad and unsecured connection, and pulled out a cell-phone.

Three rings and he was getting impatient.

Two more and the steady beat of rain on the aluminium roof made it seem like there was a tin drum settled neatly between his ears. Her voice, however, was as clear and rich as if she were standing right before him when the line went live.

"Allo?"

"Tante." Remy smiled into the phone, peering through the wet shag that stuck to his forehead at the flickering neon lights of the truck stop beyond. He shook his head, loosening his plastered ponytail, and yanked the cowl off in one deft tug.

"Ah, Remy! Been waitin' t' hear from y', chile. Jean Luc's frantic."

He smirked into the mouthpiece, cramming the last vestiges of his Guild markings into a deep interior pocket. "Tell him t' quit burnin' a hole into dat rug he likes t' pace so much – de one in front of his desk. M' fine. Bit wet 'round de edges, and missin' y' cookin' already –" he trailed off.

"Oh, don't y' t'ink _I_ don't know dat," she replied, her air instantly pompous in the motherly way only Mattie Baptiste could master. She'd had years of training dealing with him and his kin, after all. "Y' run off whenever y' feel like long enough and de whole family begins t' expect dis sort of behaviour from y' – an' at de worst time, no less –"

"Tell dat t' _père_," he cut her off flatly. Adding in a deadpan, he muttered, "An' Marius, while y' at it."

"Dey could have reached an agreement, Remy," she replied plaintively.

"Dey already did." Remy frowned, scrubbing at the steamed window panes with his sleeve to cast a cautionary glance around the parking lot. It was full, packed with enough semis to blot out the highway. Their bulk was a steel fortress that surrounded a small, ramshackle, roadside dive bearing the name, "Berty's Bucket." Seemed fitting that the Bucket boasted a Tuesday night special: all the slop you could swill, providing you forgo the glass and take the tin. It blared at him from a large, flickering neon pressed crookedly against one of the front windows. Its electric crackle was an on again off again melody, accompanied by the deep, guttering laughter of the bar's patrons. In the background, beneath the steady patter of rain and stable sounds of life, he imagined he could hear strains of Joan Jett issuing from a battered speaker or two.

He'd go in there, like he always did when that old itch presented itself, he decided. He'd find a table in a dark corner, or a bench against a far wall, or perch below the dimmest light at the bar, and he'd sit there and sip his drink and smoke his cigarettes and smile at whatever leggy thing perked his interest, and like always, the strain of solitude would ease.

Tonight would be no different. It didn't have to be New Orleans, he reassured himself. This could be anywhere in the world.

Tipping himself against the interior of the phone booth, Remy peered upwards into the night sky through the small, fogless patch. Different sky, he thought grimly, but at least the storm was letting up a bit.

"Chile, don't you sass me none. Y'd think I haven't been serving both families f' all these years de way y' talk sometimes. I know dere rules, don't mean I gotta like 'em, and lord knows, y' don't abide by dem longer den y' want."

A pause, little more than a quick reach into his sleeve, had him producing a cigarette and pressing it between his lips to smother a sigh.

On the other end of the line, back where it was warm, and the air was laden with the scent of night-blooming jasmine and heavy crepe myrtle, where the balmy calm of a sunset over the bayou painted the tops of the cypress the colour of freshly oxidized blood, Tante Mattie hesitated. "When y' comin' home, Remy?"

He shut his eyes briefly, trying to remember with difficulty what home felt like after several days of exposure from his motorcycle, the wind and the rain beating those memories into a fine silt that clung to his worn leather duster. For neither Tante nor himself, he had no answer.

"Sometime," he said finally, watching with calm acceptance as a bead of rainwater rolled off his nose and drenched the filter of his Marlboro. "Got some life t' live before I commit suicide," he added silently.

"Remy –" she began, her voice taking on a strained quality that he attempted instinctively to dismiss as a failing wireless connection.

He dropped the cigarette and reached for another, only to find his pack had run out along with his luck.

"I seen Belladonna –" she continued. The name was like sweaty fingers dragging over a raw wound. In the dim cast from the bar, beneath the steady onslaught of the storm and the abrasive babble from inside, something settled with difficulty; it was a jagged, icy pith that spread like frost from the center of his chest outwards.

"Tell _père_ everyt'ing'll be fine," he interrupted. "Just do his t'ing, keep Marius settled, and de boys in line."

Static returned to him. It was little more than a stunned pause by his wager, and even less than that if he measured out the silence with the steady thrum of his pulse. He could almost hear the intake of breath from the other end of the line as Tante readied to soothe him.

He wanted none of it.

The cold slid its wiry way down his spine, curling around the base of his tailbone and forcing the numbness into an even hum. It pulsed once, twice, and settled into his bones with the white-cool of an easily acquired anaesthesia. Memory seldom failed him in that respect.

"Just callin' t' say I hadn't been assassinated crossin' de Lake. Bye Tante," he said evenly, snapping the phone shut without waiting for a response.

He'd snaked out of the rattling, tin-drum-roofed phone booth and crossed the parking lot before noticing where his feet were leading him. The change of footing was noted, from concrete to squelching wood plank, but not acknowledged. It was the cold that drove him inside, the chilled stupor of stiffening muscles, particularly in the chest area, that kept his stance straight, his slight grin fixed, and his lids lowered as he took one step closer to the promise of oblivion at the bottom of a bottle.

The blare of the stereo, the roar of the crowd, the heat of the place sluiced off him in rivulets as he took in the raw hamster-cage smell of the place. The sodden woodchip and pungent stink of unbridled testosterone was familiar, even here in the middle of nowhere, even though he was disenfranchised and displaced. The screen door had barely banged shut behind him before he'd sought out his night's company.

Remy LeBeau cracked his neck, his gaze falling squarely on the warm curve of a wide mouth, smiling with the lopsided grace of someone who's already had a few too many of Berty's Buckets, the flash of white teeth, and the feminine line of a scarf-covered neck. He felt the pop of stiff cartilage, but distantly.

A brunette this time. Fine by him. Better than a blonde. Better to forget. He dipped his head, flashed a wolfish grin and ducked into the crowd, coming up just short of the girl's elbow moments later. She was still peering around the crowd unsteadily, trying to sort out where he'd gone as he leaned into her ear and whispered, "_Bonjour_."

Brushing against her side as she turned to stare, surprised and more than a little glazed around the edges, the heat from her body was a distinct, living presence that ignited his most basic intuitions. Still, he thought, motioning for two more drinks from the barkeep, the pins and needles feeling was as persistent and automatic as his grin.

She'd do, he decided, turning away from her uninviting fish-gape, and absorbing the push and sway of the bar's occupants. A man in a red and black checked flannel overcoat brushed him; another in a bomber jacket pressed him closer to the countertop in the attempt to place a slurred order. The bar was packed; full of men and women huddled close together with their problems tucked tightly between them. He grinned roguishly, putting on a good show of feigned disinterest to keep the girl's attention.

"How are ya doing tonight?" she shouted, tipping into his side, a hand on his shoulder to keep from losing her balance in the bustle.

If he were being honest with himself, Remy LeBeau would have said he'd never felt more alone in his life.

* * *

**Post Script:**  
The Lake: Lake Pontchartrain, more specifically the bridge that takes you into and out of the city of New Orleans.

**Translations:**  
_Père_: father  
_Bonjour_: Hello


	2. Fragile Things

**Title: **The Patron Saint of Liars and Fakes  
**Fandom: **X-Men Movieverse, post X3  
**Summary:** The strange and complicated means by which Rogue met Remy LeBeau, a dark fairytale.  
**Pairing:** Rogue/Gambit  
**Rating:** Teen/Mature  
**Warnings:** The standard fare.

**

* * *

**

**The Patron Saint of Liars and Fakes  
****...  
****Chapter II: Fragile Things**

_"__Only the phoenix rises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost."  
_- Neil Gaiman

* * *

Some people say that the paths we're destined to walk unravel like a ball of yarn before us – too quickly, oftentimes, the length and breath of that thread slips and rolls out of reach. Sometimes, those fated cords become knotted. Other times, our threads tangle across those belonging to someone else.

On this night, perhaps, Remy LeBeau wasn't counting on becoming ensnared.

But maybe that's just the way the Fates work: someone, somewhere – likely something omnipotent – saw it either cruelly apt or downright amusing to land him in the middle of a Chuck Palahniuk film. With Tom Waits blaring on the tape deck – the _tape_ deck, _sacre dieu_ – and the kindling stoked for a brawl half-way across the room, he could only draw two conclusions:

One, the brunette pressing her breasts hopefully into his bicep smelled of cheap perfume masking a day-old sweat, and two, some kid trussed-up like Robin Hood was about to get his ass handed to him by the two lugs trying to manhandle him out of the bar. Fine establishment such as this, Remy thought with no shortage of sarcasm, it was the greater courtesy to throw the half-pint back out into the rain to cool off.

Scrawny little thing, Remy considered; still a damn shame to waste a half-empty glass of whiskey on someone who was clearly drunk from only sniffing at the bottle.

The brunette – Barbie, or Brenda, or Beatrice… whatever – was attempting to suggest none-too-subtly that he take her home. Ironic, perhaps, given that he had no place or property to rest his own head that night, and a warm bed and a warm body would otherwise have been appreciated, but a niggling thought at the back of his mind instructed him to knock back his shot at the precise moment when lug number two, a beefy _homme_ weighing in at half the size of a baby elephant, saw fit to face plant not three feet from the scuffed toes of his motorcycle boots.

Remy placed his glass without looking on the exact ring of condensation left on the bar, and eyed the path cleared by three hundred and fifty pounds of pit-stained bulk with the sort of amused skepticism the Guild had tried to beat out of him from a time he barely remembered. It never caught.

Consequently, it was hardly reflexive that he lifted one eyebrow at the exact moment that the world stopped for a half-second, along with his heart.

Through the haze of smoke, and like the sound of a gunshot fired near the temple: Green eyes, glossy from too much drink. Sweat matting hair to the brow. The part of flushed lips. Satin gloves streaked with blood from cold-cocking a man three times her size…

"Be still m' beatin' heart."

Then it kept right on spinning as a chair crashed into the bar, splintering to shards that caught and brought down bottles and put a crack into the mirror over the sink as the bar's occupants suddenly sprang to life from their alcohol-induced comas.

And suddenly, strangely, the world really _was_ spinning, and so much colder.

Betty was screaming, but it was barely audible over the din.

Remy heard it with the distant sort of clarity that comes from shock, though he didn't know it then. He was reluctant to turn away from the face of an angel who was slowly, it seemed to him, floating over the fracas that convulsed upwards from the landing site of the fallen man. Reaching for him with her white, _white_ hands smeared red.

"He's been shot!"

Warmth seeped from his chest, and for a beautifully fractured moment, Remy thought to himself as he pressed his fingers to that softened, heated spot over his ribcage, that this must be what love feels like.

It was then that he realized, his fingers coming away wetly from his chest, that the vision with the green eyes and bee-stung lips wasn't any old spirit…

It was the angel of death come to claim him.

Her lips moved, and to Remy it seemed that she smiled as she embraced him before he could slump to the floor.

Remy LeBeau's last thought before the rushing darkness enfolded him was that he could find no better way to go than in the arms of a beautiful woman.


	3. Lilium Inter Spinas

**Title: **The Patron Saint of Liars and Fakes  
**Fandom: **X-Men Movieverse, post X3  
**Summary:** The strange and complicated means by which Rogue met Remy LeBeau, a dark fairytale.  
**Pairing:** Rogue/Gambit  
**Rating:** Teen/Mature  
**Warnings:** The standard fare.

**

* * *

**

******The Patron Saint of Liars and Fakes  
****...  
****Chapter III: **Lilium Inter Spinas

_"None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are."  
_- Anne Rice

**

* * *

**

This is the end, and this is the beginning.

Truer words were never spoken, save over those who find themselves misaligned and led astray from whichever purpose so set to them. Either way, the road's a knotty and thorned pass, and it leads forever downwards.

This is how we find ourselves growing old: the heartbeat's metronomic rhythm synced with heart monitors. Time measured in a haze, weighed against the caliber and speed of a bullet (twenty two, on the first count, to be precise; eight hundred miles an hour, on the other, roughly.)

Incredible, that a man could peel back the clotted haze of congealed blood, borderline pneumonic collapse, and wake to new truths:

The first thought to cross Remy LeBeau's groggy consciousness upon reviving to the dimmed confines of a hospital room, was: Toto, we ain't in Kansas anymore.

The second, being: Who cut the lock off the gates to Sesame Street?

The bespectacled blue monster tending to his dressings was surprisingly gentle, and even more disorienting, eloquent:

With all the unconquerable wisdom in the world, the doctor said to him, "Ah. You're awake."

* * *

From those who thought to ask her if she needed anything, she demanded, "Tylenol."

There was a half-empty bottle sitting on the blotter in front of her, before the empty space for a chair that once belonged to Charles Xavier. Spitefully, the glass of water to go with the Tylenol was conveniently absent, along with the little nameplate that ought to have read, "Ororo".

Perhaps that's why the "Ms. Frost" engraving seemed a prelude for the cool sort of silent punishment Wolverine was giving her, the lack-of-water torture and all.

Just as Rogue had begun contemplating swallowing her tongue to generate enough spit to consume two pills to ease her pounding hangover-inspired headache, her tormentor spoke,

"You know you're not legally old enough to be drinking."

She'd hauled a mostly-dead man, wrapped in his trench coat, halfway through Pennsylvania before the big lunker she'd absorbed had worn off and his truck had run out of gas, and all Logan wanted to do was remind her not to hang out with her three new best friends: Jim, Jack and Jose.

"Is he dead?" she asked in return.

Logan continued to examine her in that unscrupulous way of his, arms folded across his barrel-like chest.

She raised an eyebrow. It hurt. Rogue gave up, letting her eyes shut when Logan's direct appraisal began making the roots of her hair tingle from discomfort. (Granted, that may have been the hangover still at work.)

"Where's Ororo?" She tried a different tactic.

The mansion seemed to sigh around her; all that oak paneling filling in the blanks left open by her former mentor.

Still, Logan left her floundering...

Left her with thoughts of screams and splintering furniture, the gunshot wound and subsequent, slowing breath of the man who had taken an errant and stray bullet intended for her; its place marked over her heart to still the pains caused by her own hand; fingers clasped over hers for too long a second as she tried to shelter the man, eyes already too dark around the irises to be natural. A mutant - surely, he was - smiling with the beautiful, serene acceptance of those souls promised to the velveteen shadows of the grave; seeing the gates beyond and already reaching for them...

Rogue checked herself, realizing she'd stopped breathing from the momentary hysteria wrought from Wolverine's maddening silence.

From the errant click of lungs unable to draw air, suffocating because she couldn't cover his mouth with her own and breathe for him...

Lordy, she did _not_ want to ask the next question. It seemed so futile:

"Am I in trouble?"

In response, at her back, the door clicked shut.

Damn, Rogue thought, cracking open an eye to find the spot that Logan had occupied, now empty.

Hugging herself, she shifted in her seat, in the hush and with the pounding of her pulse her only company. Her gloves had left smears of darker substances on her sleeves - the green wool stained beyond repair in too many places to count. Already, the coat - her favorite - was fit for the dumpster at the back of the school: telltale markings of the struggle for survival.

Something stayed her from taking it off, from picking at the stiff satin of her gloves stained red. She flexed her hands into fists, making the fabric crackle, peeling away from where the man's blood had made her only protection stick to the skin of her hands.

He'd had no ID on him. No wallet. No cellphone.

Two, Rogue thought, pulling her lower lip between her teeth: the thing making her heart pound, that kept her from shedding the evidence of her failure, was numbered at the number of lives that she'd failed to save in as many weeks.

Tasting copper, she bit down harder as her vision swam and her eyes burned.

Instead of crying, Rogue lifted her stiff limbs, and drew her hood low over her eyes.


End file.
